Affinity Photo

[Vizioen]

Well I bought it, but coming from photoshop I don't know what the hell I'm doing. It certainly differs from the workflow I'm used to. I still haven't figured out how in the hell I use an alpha mask on a adjustment layer or ask a mask for something else. I tried dragging it on top of the other layer but it doesn't want to.

[flino2004]

Vizioen ...I feel exactly the same!!! I was so happy to eliminate Adobe and their subscription of my life but few days ago after some frustration because I couldn't work as fast as i wanted with Affinity i almost activide my F&%$ing adobe account....I do have to forget my workflow and I accommodate myself to a new one with affinity.

[Alex_M]

Well I bought it, but coming from photoshop I don't know what the hell I'm doing. It certainly differs from the workflow I'm used to. I still haven't figured out how in the hell I use an alpha mask on a adjustment layer or ask a mask for something else. I tried dragging it on top of the other layer but it doesn't want to.

Select your adjustment layer and go to Layer-> New Mask Layer. After that you can start painting your mask. If you already have the mask as a layer, drag that layer between the thumbnail and the name of the layer you want to put the mask on. You will see a thin vertical blue line appear between the two telling you it will be added as a mask to that layer. Hopefully this helps, let me know!

After a quick test run, all in all I've got a good impression.

Things I like so far:

1. Layers are always "Smart Layers". I can resize them as much times as I want without loss of quality without having to first convert them to Smart Layers. They are "Smart" from the very beginning and stay that way always until I tell AF to rasterize them.
2. I feel that it's faster than PS especially with large documents.
3. Moving groups with layers feels a lot more smoother. This in PS is excruciatingly sloooow.
4. Filters also feel a lot more faster.
5. Another thing that's interesting is you can have more than 1 mask for a layer/group. That's quite handy. In PS I had to put the layer/group in a new group and put a mask on that.
6. File size of of documents in some cases is around 3-5 times smaller compared to PS.

Things I miss so far but I can live with:

1. I see there's no search function by layer name/type but I don't use this often.
2. Small scaled up objects appear pixelated after enlarging, as if there's no filtering applied. I think there's some setting that I miss that tells AF to do this enlargement filtering automatically. Anybody knows? When I save the document as JPG or any other image format, everything looks fine and no pixelation appears. So obviously AF applies it but only when outputting the document to a raster format. I found out that applying a gaussian blur to such enlarged pixelated layers kind of makes it better but it's a bit tedious to have to do this everytime instead of AF doing it automatically as PS does. I think it's on purpose. It's a way for AF to keep document size low because unfiltered/pixelated layers require less information to be stored. If they get filtered after resize, all the blurred pixels and their gradations/shades have to be stored in the file which increases file size. Doing the filtering at the end of the design process (when exporting to raster file) ensures low document size. Maybe if there was a toggle that let's you preview the document with all enlarged objects filtered... that would be fantastic.
3. I can't color code layers and folders.
4. I don't see the cursor changing to the loading animation when Affinity Photo is "thinking". For example when loading a document/image. There's a little text message at the top right corner which helps but...
5. Puppet Warp or "Distort" as it is called in AF is not a live layer so you can't adjust it or remove it from the layer once you apply the effect.

Things I don't like:

1. In the list of layers/groups, adding/removing layers & groups to the selection for the 2nd time with SHIFT+CLICK works properly only when doing it from the top-down. If you try to do it from the bottom-up the previously selected layers get deselected. Very weird. Maybe it's a bug that is best to be reported so it's fixed. Reminds me of the exact same problem with Scene Explorer in Max where you also can't properly select objects with SHIFT+CLICK because the previous selection get deselected.
2. I can't ALT+CLICK to quickly select the layer under my cursor.

What are your impressions with Affinity Photo?

[Vizioen]

What are your impressions with Affinity Photo?

Well thanks for the explanation but I've tried that. While it's not even easy to get to the point where you get that "thin vertical blue line", I think there's a hotspot of about 2 pixels where it allows you to drop it. If I release he just puts it as a pixel layer underneath the RGB layer. Or any layer for that matter.

My impressions are: it lacks stability, I think it's slow (with the documents I've tried). I've only tried it with 4K 32bit images but it crashed more on me in a day than it Photoshop ever crashed on me in 10 years. I want to like it because I like some features that I really wanted in photoshop but dragging a mask on a 2 pixel hotspot (and it not working) is a real down side. Some features are user friendly while others aren't. I don't understand why all the different 'modes' (persona?) need to work like that. Is there any good introduction for people coming from photoshop somewhere? Because I might be tackling this the wrong way. I don't understand the difference between develop and tone mapping either. Also I want to use these modes like an adjustment layer or filter not as something that needs to be applied so I can go back and change it., instead of "baking" it.

[Alex_M]

Sorry, I see I missed a step with the masks. For the layer to act like a regular black & white mask, you should select the layer and then go to Layer -> Rasterize to Mask. It will say "(mask)" by the name of the layer instead of "(pixel)". This shows it's a B&W mask now instead of a pixel mask that will mask everything which is a solid pixel regardless of the color of the pixel in the mask. The way you did it is still a mask but it's not the ones you are used to. In this kind of mask solid pixels are visible no matter the color, no pixels makes masked layer transparent.

Does it work now? Sorry for the omission!

As far as stability goes - I had it crash on me once in the hour or two I played with it but it was with a PSD file so maybe it's more stable when you work in a native aphoto document from the beginning? I still haven't tried working with 32 bit files (most of the times I save out my images in 8 bits). What did you do to make it crash? Does it do it randomly or it's always happening with a specific action? I will test the 32 bit images out.

PS: I get instant crashes to desktop as soon as I add a Levels adjustment layer in 32-bit documents.

[Richard7666]

Here's a key question: can Affinity use quick-select/magic wand tools in 32bit?

That pisses me off in Photoshop, I often want to quickly grab a mask (from my matID layer) and cannot easily do so (unless there is some secret way to convert only certain layers to 8bit while all the rest remain in 32bit, but I don't think so)

[Mokiki]

On my home station I recently installed Affinity Photo because I didn't want to keep Adobe for how little I use photoshop at home.
After opening it a few times over the last month to do some quick touch ups etc. I became quickly frustrated about the difference in workflows.
Not enough to go back to Adobe but I wonder why they decided to differ so much in workflows when they probably knew/expected people to come over from photoshop etc.

Maybe this is completely intentional and will make sense once I get used to it but at the moment I am confused every time I open the program :P

[Vizioen]

Sorry, I see I missed a step with the masks. For the layer to act like a regular black & white mask, you should select the layer and then go to Layer -> Rasterize to Mask. It will say "(mask)" by the name of the layer instead of "(pixel)". This shows it's a B&W mask now instead of a pixel mask that will mask everything which is a solid pixel regardless of the color of the pixel in the mask. The way you did it is still a mask but it's not the ones you are used to. In this kind of mask solid pixels are visible no matter the color, no pixels makes masked layer transparent.

Does it work now? Sorry for the omission!

As far as stability goes - I had it crash on me once in the hour or two I played with it but it was with a PSD file so maybe it's more stable when you work in a native aphoto document from the beginning? I still haven't tried working with 32 bit files (most of the times I save out my images in 8 bits). What did you do to make it crash? Does it do it randomly or it's always happening with a specific action? I will test the 32 bit images out.

PS: I get instant crashes to desktop as soon as I add a Levels adjustment layer in 32-bit documents.

It works now, but how do you refine a mask because right click refine and fiddling with the options doesn't seem to propagate to the mask even if you select the right options. Or the preview doesn't really correspond with what it should be at least. Don't think I will switch to affinity any time soon.

[Alex_M]

Here's a key question: can Affinity use quick-select/magic wand tools in 32bit?

That pisses me off in Photoshop, I often want to quickly grab a mask (from my matID layer) and cannot easily do so (unless there is some secret way to convert only certain layers to 8bit while all the rest remain in 32bit, but I don't think so)

Yes, I tried it on a 32-bit image and magic wand works for me.

On my home station I recently installed Affinity Photo because I didn't want to keep Adobe for how little I use photoshop at home.
After opening it a few times over the last month to do some quick touch ups etc. I became quickly frustrated about the difference in workflows.
Not enough to go back to Adobe but I wonder why they decided to differ so much in workflows when they probably knew/expected people to come over from photoshop etc.

Maybe this is completely intentional and will make sense once I get used to it but at the moment I am confused every time I open the program :P

There are a ton of useful videos on their Vimeo channel - https://vimeo.com/macaffinity/videos I learned a lot of things from there, check them out. I'm getting used to the workflow pretty quickly after I watched these.

It works now, but how do you refine a mask because right click refine and fiddling with the options doesn't seem to propagate to the mask even if you select the right options. Or the preview doesn't really correspond with what it should be at least. Don't think I will switch to affinity any time soon.

Refine mask works fine for me. Even with 32-bit images. You can more easily see the changes to the mask if you choose another preview method in the "Preview" dropdown such as "Black and white". Also, you might want to disable "Matte Edges".

As I mentioned above, check their Vimeo channel - https://vimeo.com/macaffinity/videos Most of the things I learned about APhoto I learned from there and the rest from their forum and the help file (hit F1 while in APhoto).

I did my first full commercial post-production on a render with APhoto a couple of days ago. I had already done the post process with PS but there were changes to the render (the vertical resolution had to be increased) and I figured out why not to do it from scratch with APhoto as a test to see how it holds up. It came out looking the same and the file size was more than half lower than the PSD (41 Mb instead of 83 Mb) even though the resolution of the render was 35% higher in the APhoto document (4000 x 4000 px instead of 4000 x 3000 px). Maybe it's because of the usage of live filters which don't require to have more pixel layers.

[Mokiki]

Thanks Alex, I'll take a look.

[Richard7666]

Another question: I've heard that ArionFX works in Affinity but only in 16bit, not 32bit, can anyone confirm?

[NicoC]

That pisses me off in Photoshop, I often want to quickly grab a mask (from my matID layer)

Sorry, but that seems stone-age practice to me ... have you ever thought about trying PSDManager ?
And since Affinity Photo can perfectly load PSD files (16 or 32bpc), I guess it's worth for you giving it a try.
Oh, and please note that apart being a long time beta tester for PSDManager, I'm not affiliated commercially in anyway with Cebas or Daniel Schmidt

[Vizioen]

Sorry, but that seems stone-age practice to me ... have you ever thought about trying PSDManager ?
And since Affinity Photo can perfectly load PSD files (16 or 32bpc), I guess it's worth for you giving it a try.
Oh, and please note that apart being a long time beta tester for PSDManager, I'm not affiliated commercially in anyway with Cebas or Daniel Schmidt

What does PSD manager do that you don't need to select a mask anymore?

[NicoC]

What does PSD manager do that you don't need to select a mask anymore?

It creates the masks for you, providing users several methods: Object IDs, MatIDs, Scene Layers, custom objects, Named Selection Sets ... I've used it for years, and could hardly work without it TBH.
I suggest you take a look at some YouTube videos like this one for example (pretty old, but it shows some basics). You could also take a look at the PSDM web page. Daniel Schmidt could easily give you access to a demo version if you want to give it a try ... but be careful, if you try it, you could love it

[Richard7666]

I just use a script by...he's on this forum but I can't recall who and don't have max open to check ��...to automatically add different colour for each material in the scene to my matID render element.
I currently load my multichannel exr's with ProEXR in Photoshop.

But either way, I don't see how I'm meant to select a colour from my matte elements without using magic wand etc, regardless of how the matter layer was generated.